Like This, for Ever

the same drug, then …’
    Behind Stenning another detective appeared. Stenning practically jumped away from Lacey. ‘I’ll see you,’ he told her, before pushing past her, crossing the road and jumping into his car. He hadn’t promised to keep her informed or to get in touch with her again. Nor would he. She had no role in the investigation and Stenning, of all people, would toe the line.
    OK, did she go in or stay out? Instinctively, out felt right. She’d be on the move, able to look in parks and on scrubland, around garages, even clamber into gardens and peer into outbuildings. It would be pointless, of course, nothing more than keeping her body on the move to stop her head exploding. Trying to find two young boys in the whole of South London.
    As she let herself into her flat, the phone was ringing.
Joesbury
. She grabbed it.
    ‘Lacey, it’s me.’
    The most familiar voice in the world, one that she’d never get used to calling her Lacey.
    ‘Are you OK? What’s happened?’ Behind the woman’s voice she could hear others arguing, heavy doors slamming shut. The everyday noise of a women’s prison. And what she didn’t need right now was a crisis in the north-east. She could not leave London.
    ‘I won’t have long, but I had to talk to you,’ the prisoner said. ‘What I saw on the news tonight, about the latest child that’s gone missing. Is it his? Joesbury’s son?’
    Conscious that precious seconds were ticking away – phone calls from prisons never lasted long – Lacey found it impossible to answer. If she didn’t say anything now, it might not all be true. She wouldn’t have seen the glass of the interview-room wall shattering, the man she loved in pieces, the pale-faced mother thanking the people whose inability to do their jobs would cost her her son before the night was out. The woman on the phone took the answer as read.
    ‘Is it significant, do you think? That he’s a senior police officer’s kid? Or just chance?’
    ‘Probably just chance,’ Lacey managed. ‘Huck is the latest of seven. None of the others had any connection to the police. He just got very unlucky.’
    ‘Lacey, you have to find him. If he loses his son, he’ll never get over it. You don’t recover from something like that. He might look the same, but inside he’ll rot away.’
    Like you did
, Lacey thought.
Is that going to happen to everyone I love?
‘I’m not part of the investigation,’ she said. ‘Besides, they have a suspect in custody.’
    ‘Who is he?’
    Forcing herself to keep talking, Lacey explained that the odd boy from next door had accused his own father of the killings; that he’d been suspicious for a while and that finding out about his mother’s death, and jumping to the conclusion that his father had been responsible, had been the last straw.
    ‘And what do you think?’ the woman asked, when Lacey had finished. ‘You know this guy. Does he strike you as being a killer?’
    ‘They never do,’ said Lacey. ‘But there’s a case to answer. Even the Dracula stuff fits. Stewart’s a lecturer at King’s College. His speciality is Gothic literature. You remember the stuff I used toread? Ann Radcliffe,
The Monk
,
Frankenstein
? Well, Dracula’s probably the best-known example of Gothic literature in two hundred years. He would have known it backwards. Barney told me they have several copies in the house.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘What do you mean, no?’
    ‘He’s not your man. Oh shit, Lacey, this is awful. All the police energy will be focused on him now, persuading him to give up information he doesn’t have. And it’s your fault.’
    Was everyone going to blame her for what was going on?
    ‘Lacey, are you still there? OK, I listened to everything you said and frankly, out of the father and the son, I’d be more worried about the son, but just put that to one side for a second. The vampire stuff is the clincher for me. I had some time in the IT room today and I managed to look back through all the quotes from the novel that appeared on Facebook – the ones from the bloke who claims to be the killer. In fact, I’ve got them all with me, and I promise you, whoever this Peter Sweep is, he’s never read
Dracula
in his life.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘OK, on the sixteenth of February, the same day that Hunt character started sounding off on TV, he posted this:
Do you not know that tonight when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?
Later that